152: Getting Wired to Your Customers, David Cathcart, CFO, North Highland

The following is unedited abstract* from the CFO Thought Leader podcast featuring David Cathcart, CFO, North Highland and Jack Sweeney, co-host of MME Thought Leader.

CFOTL: During your tour of duty at North Highland, can you share with us a moment of strategic insight that you had or your team had, the finance team had that perhaps brought some strategic insight forward and led North Highland maybe change its approach in some area or point the direction in a new area?

CATHCART: So for us, one of the things that we drove last year was increased visibility into the fact that we can offer services to clients all up and down the rate guard, from $80 to $800 an hour and that conventional wisdom might hold that the $80 work is less profitable than the $800 work but the data proves otherwise, and in other words, at the lower end of that rate card, we can oftentimes be driving more profitable work at these lower rates than at the opposite end of the rate card. So, that was an insight that was valuable with leadership teams as we considered what directions to be investing in as we look to the next several years.

CFOTL: Can you tell us about your team and the types of skills that you're looking to add?

CATHCART: The mix of skills that I look for include -- I'd like to see both big business and small business experience. The small business tends to bring along with it a distinct roll up your sleeves, wear a lot of hats attitude about business, whereas bigger companies tend to define swim lane and ask you to stay in your lane and get really great at that lane. That's for example what I found at GE when I was there. So, I like a mix of both of these types of experience. I think that these folks will have an easier time adding value because they've had that mix of experiences so far in their careers before they've come to us.

CFOTL: Dave, we now come to the mentoring round where we get to ask you several quick questions that allow you to give advice to aspiring finance leaders. Have you had a mentor day or mentors during the course of your finance career?

CATHCART: Yes, I've been extremely grateful in that regard.

CFOTL: And you mentioned you were in Big 5 as well as GE, can you share any more detail as to what types of professionals helped mentor you?

CATHCART: I've been in business 25 years and I'm actually having lunch next week with my first boss from 25 years ago. So, these relationships are deep and at this point in my life, an extreme sense of gratitude for those who invested in me early on as you would imagine. So, I think for me the great mentors were ones that not just helps teach the functional work but helps rounded me out, so the importance of human relationships and client relationships, those folks that were able to help round me out and help accelerate my learning curve that in professional services, mentoring is just a key part of the people model, so I was a beneficiary of that from day one.

CFOTL: When you entered the CFO office for your first day as CFO, what is it that you wish someone had told you at that moment in time?

CATHCART: I think that something that maybe took me a bit of time to wake up to is that the CFO role is the functional expertise that it takes to succeed in the CFO role. That expertise is tantamount to table stakes. What the operating leaders expect from their CFO, what the CEO expects from their CFO is a seasoned well-rounded business leader who can help them think strategically, who can help them through an HR issue on one phone call and then pivot very quickly to facilities issue on the next call.

So, on paper you can look like a great CFO but that on paper part is going to more than likely say, "I've done X, Y and Z in my career," a very functional focus. And that's just a given. So on day one, all that is expected of you and it's really that the business is going to be looking to you to bring way more insight value than what it took you to get there.

*Note: This unedited abstract may contain electronic transmission errors, resulting in inaccurate or nonsensical word combinations, or untranslated symbols which cannot be deciphered by our transcription process. This abstract may differ from an edited transcript of the same interview in content, page and line numbers, punctuation and formatting.